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TWO Socializing Delinquency Child Welfare, Mental Health, and the Critique of Institutions, 1929–1949 On September 1, 1941, the Texas Board of Control simultaneously fired the superintendents of both the boys’ and the girls’ training schools. The move came in the aftermath of yet another round of abuse scandals, which had resulted in legislative investigations and bad publicity in the late 1930s. However, the immediate cause for the firings was the publication of two audit reports commissioned by the tbc, which portrayed both schools as little more than prisons. Observers with long memories surely would have found the reports’ descriptions depressingly familiar . The auditor summed up Gatesville’s “entire atmosphere” as “one of prison and penal confinement,” in which boys of all ages and offense categories crowded into “deplorable” dormitories with “open shower and toilet facilities placed in one corner of the room with no screen or partition separating them from the sleeping quarters.” The academic school lacked basic educational materials and trained teachers, while the “non-existent” vocational program served mainly to provide institution-maintaining labor. Whether toiling in fields or workshops or shuffling silently into broken-down cafeterias and dormitories, the boys experienced nothing but “regimentation and repression,” for which the report blamed the staff, described as “well educated mule skinners.” Earl H. Nesbitt, the Gatesville superintendent , spent most of his time “trading, buying, and selling mules and other livestock” instead of giving “his full time and effort to the rehabilitation of the boys.” In short, the institution had changed little, and perhaps even regressed, since the cycle of reform and rollback examined in the previous chapter. Similar complaints filled the auditor’s report on Gainesville, which clearly had declined since the progressive administration of Carrie Weaver Smith. However, the Gainesville report included something new: an emphasis on the staff’s lack of “knowledge of child psychology.” While both reports cited the need for “individualized treatment,” the Gainesville audit specifically called for substituting “patient redirection” for physical discipline and incorporating the lessons of “child S O C I A L I Z I N G D E L I N Q U E N C Y · 43 guidance” into the training schools’ rehabilitation program. Although applied more to girls than to boys in these particular reports, the lens of child psychology began to cast training school conditions in an entirely different light. These reports reflected the growing influence of two distinct but related trends that emerged unevenly in the first half of the twentieth century in Texas: the growth of an expansive concept of child welfare, which favored community-based prevention and diversion programs over large institutions; and an emerging concern for children’s mental health, which reframed juvenile delinquency and rehabilitation in psychological rather than moral terms. By the 1940s, a new generation of child savers regarded the training schools as irredeemably backward not only for their abusive physical conditions but also for the emotional damage they wreaked on child and adolescent development. No longer would reformers settle for warehousing delinquent youth in institutions; instead, they invoked a broadly conceived notion of community responsibility in calling for the “socializing” of delinquency, to borrow the legal scholar Michael Willrich’s term. During the 1930s and 1940s, cities such as Dallas and Houston became laboratories for the idea that delinquency grew from environmental rather than individual roots and called for solutions based on treatment rather than punishment. The commitment to shared social responsibility for ills such as poverty and delinquency only grew during the Great Depression and World War II, lending further impetus to new reforms in the administration of juvenile justice and corrections in Texas. In 1949, the Texas legislature enacted the Texas Youth Development Act—a dramatic aboutface that threatened to put Texas in the forefront of juvenile justice and corrections nationwide. Sweeping juvenile justice reform at the statewide level in the 1940s would not have been possible without the changes wrought at the local level in preceding decades. Collectively, local and state reforms reflected the impact of an emerging discourse of childhood protected by a caring community and preserved through the new science of children’s mental health. Although not embraced by all, hotly contested, and even contradictory at times, this discourse drove the campaigns for youth recreation and against whipping juvenile inmates that are described in this chapter. Some advocates extended their concern to youth of Mexican origin and African American youth, while others continued to draw distinct lines separating white from nonwhite, middle class...

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